Summary: Categories

There is a list of current categories and a set of pages where agreed translation of those categories can be found, linked from Translation_Help_Needed

As a general principle:

The UserBase page for the application should have its traditional category (manual writers can add the application category if they wish).

Tutorials, FAQ's etc should also have the traditional categories (again, the application category can be added).

Pages that are part of the manual should only have the application category.

The application category may also be used for any application that has many subpages.

New categories should only be considered if no existing one can be applied. If a new category is essential it must be added to all the translation tables listed on Translation_Help_Needed. Application-name categories may be omitted from those tables, as they will only be translated for non-latin alphabet languages. The translator is expected to know the official glyphs for the name translation.

KAddressBook and Plasma/FAQ are examples of pages where they are simply a re-direct to the latest version of the application. The problem arises if the text on one of those versioned pages contains something like [[KAddressBook/Enabling_Resources]]. There is no such section, because it's on the versioned page.

The solution is that the part that the reader sees can be trimmed for readability but the link must specify the version page.

Summary: Problem with links to subsections

Special:myLanguage finds the correct page, but then looks for a subsection with the English title, which of course it fails to find. Siebrand offers this workaround:

This will work if you add anchor points to your pages that cannot be translated. For example, add to the source text to allow anchors to always work. I experimented with this a while ago. The exact implementation may differ from what I write here, but I'm certain it's close.
siebrand 08:44, 23 August 2010

This is working on a number of pages, so appears to be the correct solution for us.

Summary: Using Smileys

ASCII smilies cause problems for translators, because the system reports unbalanced parentheses. Instead, please us icons such as [[Image:face-smile.png]] . Keeping the size below 15px constrains it vertically so that the text line isn't distorted.

Additionally, UserBase is linked to InstantCommons where you can search for other smilies or other images. You do not need any special addressing - they act as though they are uploaded onto our server.

Summary of Marking for updates causes strange corruptions

There was a good deal of confusion caused when an English page was accidentally translated and had to be rolled back. When that was marked as ready for translation again, the language statistics appeared to be incorrect - and in fact the two sets of statistics did not agree. Nikerabbit explains this:
<quote>
Few notes that hopefully help to clarify things:
Special:LanguageStats: if group is 100% translated, the default task is 'review all changes' (definition pink + translation green) instead of 'show untranslated' (untranslated blue, outdated pink). If this is confusing we should discuss how to make it less confusing.

If the one who marks page for translation chooses to not invalidate translations, those translation should never show up in the view of untranslated messages, nor affect translation percentages. The only difference is that if you somehow go and edit one of those, you will see a difference between the old and new definition like you see for other invalidated translations.

Summary of the Templates discussion

Some templates require localisation, others don't. We will for now include all templates in the translatable area, leaving the translators to make the decision. The difficulty, as I understand it, is that we have two types of templates - those with replaceable text, which should definitely be translated, and those with fixed text, where a localised version is substituted.

Summary of Translating Pages - section sequence

If any new section is added between existing sections, the system will allocate a section number. The number is used by the system to know where it came from and where the translated section must be placed, but to the translator it will appear out of sequence.

It is essential that during the markup phase care is taken to ensure sufficient context remains for the translators to make good judgements. Translators meeting bad examples should alert the admin group.

Summary of Images discussion

Images need more white space around them than you might expect. A double-empty line above the image is desirable, a double-empty line below the image is required, to avoid the possibility of undesirable line-wrapping.

Use of menuchoice tag

Do we have a policy regarding use of the <menuchoice> ... </menuchoice> tag? The typographical guidelines mentiones only menu choices. Common practice also includes other named entities in the GUIs, such as buttons, textfields, dialogs etc. I assume this is all OK (IMHO it should be).

Recently I have come across a number of examples, where ordinary reference to things, that can be done in a GUI have also been enclosed in these tags, even though they do not specify a GUI element. An example might look something like this:

I think this is potentially confusing and should be avoided. In cases like the above I don't think emphasizing is needed at all, but if some general terms must be emphasized, I think it is preferable to use ordinary bolding.

I came across a similar issue within link texts. Link texts already stand out, and adding extra emphasis to words in a link doesn't look good in my opinion. I haven't done anything about these - I know that there are other considerations, such as compliance with docbook, but does that apply to links?

[quote]I have to re-write wiki2docbook to replace <menuchoice> with [/quote] - how useful is <menuchoice> then? It seems strange to me that I'm going through pages changing "" into <menuchoice> when you have to change them back.

I don't think there's much we can do to help with the keycap parsing, though. Sorry about the "OK" - I think I've only done it once, and it certainly wasn't intentional. I have a bad habit of thinking that I just need to get to a certain point before stopping work, when it would have been better if I had stopped a little earlier.

Maybe we need a thread somewhere more central about which pages need strict markup, and which are better served by just bold and italic carefully applied.

That was a very useful clarification. Looking at the docbook code for rekonq, I get the impression, that we should not use emphasis on application names when they appear in the text of a link. Is that correct?

Yes, I'll do that. I guessed that it was better not to use it in section headers (I left some in because they were originally there, and I wasn't sure) but I wouldn't have thought of leaving it out of the templates - I assume that the same applies to Information, Notes and Tips templates.

Sorry to keep going on about this issue, but today I encountered some difficult problems translating KrossWordPuzzle. There are several problems all related to the use of the menuchoice tag.

First, It seems to me to be potentially confusing to ordinary readers to use the menuchoice tags for anything other than actually explaining how to do some task using the GUI. If we use menuchoice tags the way the are used in the feature list of KrossWordPuzzle, readers may confuse what is merely a list of capabilities with a discription of how to actually accomplish something (and be frustrated because the don't understand the "directions").

Secondly, using the name of a GUI element in its "literal sense", fx treating Open as a verb, is going to cause problems to many translators. The great differences between the various grammatical systems would force translators to write awkward (perhaps even ungrammatical) texts.

Thirdly, we can never be sure, that a translation of the GUI even exists. If it doesn't, a translator of the UserBase page may need to have English words in the translation. Here I am assuming, that the name of a GUI element should always appear in print exactly as it is shown on the screen, which seems highly desirably to me.

Therefore I would recommend that names of GUI elements are avoided in feature list and similar places where we are talking about the capabilities of an application, but not about how to accomplish anything in detail. Perhaps the simplest way to think about this is to allways treat the thing enclosed in a menuchoice tag as a proper name. Would it be a good idea to add something like this to the guidelines or are there better ways to deal with the problems?

I did say that you might find other pages that were written before I had had the conversation with Yurchor. The best thing to do is simply point me to them, and I'll fix the problems. I'm dealing with so many pages that I can't possibly remember which pages might be affected, so you will just have to prompt me. Sorry.

Actually, my latest complaint was about yet another kind of problem with the use of the menuchoice tags. The KrossWordPuzzle page did not "abuse" the tag in the way we talked about earlier, but I still think that the way menu items were referenced is unfortunate. I'm sorry I didn't make that clear enough.

Thirdly, we can never be sure, that a translation of the GUI even exists. If it doesn't, a translator of the UserBase page may need to have English words in the translation. Here I am assuming, that the name of a GUI element should always appear in print exactly as it is shown on the screen, which seems highly desirably to me.

I do not think it's a good idea to translate manuals for the applications with untranslated interface. Anyway, KrossWordPuzzle has not been translated to Danish yet. I cannot even to contact with the developer to ask him is it worth to put DocBook in the main SVN module, but that's the different story. ;)

To keep the good translations, I asked that screenshots can be translated, not as in Amarok Quickstart. It will be LP-quality translations of manuals if translators never use the applications. ;)

This author was active for a good while, but seems to have disappeared at the moment. I too tried to contact him. His apps are nice. I don't want to lose them.

I've re-marked the KrossWordPuzzle page. No guarantees that it's right, but of course you are free to edit as necessary.

The typographical guidelines are fairly straightforward to document. I'm beginning to think that we need a separate page for the actual markup for translations, and to ask translators to join the Talk page to help work out rules. I'm clear on straightforward decisions, but less formal pages are very difficult for me, and therefore I am not likely to write a good guideline for this.

I wasn't aware of the problem with the Amarok QSG pages - and there are a lot of them. I'll try to fix those over the next few days.

Another question came up regarding the way we emphasize applications. The problem comes up in the genitive case: Where in English we would have fx "The Amarok menues ..." og "Amarok's menues ...", the proper Danish translation would be "Amaroks menuer ...", i.e. the same as the latter English form but without the apostrophe. Is it desirable to keep the s ending unbolded (it does look a little odd)?

Sometimes a paragraph has an image or a snippet of code inserted with blank lines around the inserted item. In those cases the whole paragraph - blank lines and all - should be kept in one translation unit.

Off-line translation tools require headings to be in separate sections. Blank lines separate the sections, so this can't be fixed.

While I was translating the page on Kopete, the original was rearranged a bit. In particular, some sections were removed, and the remaining sections were renumbered. .... It should be OK to have translation units that are not consecutively numbered, right?

The sections should never be manually re-numbered. They will, sometimes, look non-consecutive, but the extension understands where they came from and where they must be put back. Manual editing breaks this.

The latest changes (which are not approved, which makes it so that the current translations are not outdated)

Correct - until the changes have been marked for translation they will not indicate the need for new translations. It may be that a number of changes are planned before the new version is complete.

Old pages have unacceptable typography.

Editing using Typographical_Guidelines will fix that.

Empty sections, prepared for information to be added later, are a problem when it comes to DocBook production.

They are fine in the early stages of building a page, but should be removed if they can't be filled before the page is marked for translation. --annew 12:28, 10 June 2010 (CEST)

There is a problem, that is bound to come up from time to time: Sometimes small changes are made to a page to correct spelling, grammar or formatting. Often, these changes do not affect the translations

When marking for translation it is now possible to check these as not affecting the translation.

If absolutely necessary you can use this to find all pages with fuzzy tags, then open section , delete fuzzy tags .--Qiii2006 19:36, 12 June 2010 (CEST)

Thanks, this is usefull! It doesn't solve the above problem, though, as the sections in question are not marked as fuzzy. I just checked - An_introduction_to_KDE/de doesn't appear on the German list, but the page is still marked as outdated (98% complete).

That was a different bug, now fixed.

By the way: Most (every?) time this problem has occured on one of the Danish pages, it has ben caused of two kinds of edits to the English original: Either a link of the form Page has been changed to Page or unneeded space characters have been removed for a wiki-link. I hope a solution can be found, for these kinds of changes are quite valuable to translators.

Another problem just occured to me. All links to translated pages needs to be changed as they are transferred to the new framework!

As we go through pages red-links are obvious, so we should be fine for fixing them. --annew 20:52, 28 June 2010 (CEST)